6. Soul of the Age, by Jonathan Bate, pp. 131-161

Second Age: Schoolboy; Chapter 9, Shakespeare's Small Library; Third Age: Lover, Chapter 10, The Married Man

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Ben Jonson was a man of books. Although he didn't attend university, he collected books and commented on them, and played a large part in getting Shakespeare's First Folio published. When his library was destroyed by fire in 1623, perhaps taking his own copy of the First Folio with it, he began collecting again. As Bate comments, "If only Jonson's annotations on Shakespeare had survived instead of those on Justus Lipsius's De Calumnia or Clement Edmonds's Observations on the autobiographical and historical writings of Julius Caesar!"

But no books known to have been owned by or annotated by Shakespeare have shown up, or at least the ones that have shown up are mostly demonstrable forgeries, leading Bate and others to conclude, "Where Jonson was a methodical reader, Shakespeare was an opportune one. He snapped up phrases and ideas from his reading, storing them in his capacious memory. He may not have bothered with underlinings and marginal annotation."

Bate conjectures that he may have borrowed most of the books that served him as sources for the poems and plays, and that one of the people who loaned him books was Richard Field, whom he had known at school in Stratford and who printed not only Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece but also North's Plutarch and a Latin edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Field may also have supplied Shakespeare with Holinshed's Chronicles and John Harington's translation of Orlando Furioso, which was a source for Much Ado About Nothing. Shakespeare seems to have paid tribute to Field in Cymbeline with a reference to "a very valiant Briton" named Richard du Champ. When Field printed foreign language books, he sometimes translated his name into the corresponding language on the title page, as when he called himself Ricardo del Campo in several Spanish books.

Another source for borrowed books would have been Shakespeare's patron, the earl of Southampton, and one of the patron's of Shakespeare's acting company, the earl of Pembroke. Ben Jonson may also have loaned or sold him books from his own library of more than two hundred volumes. But "even among literary men in the period it was not common to own large numbers of books," Bate notes. "The greatest scholar of the age, splendidly named Julius Caesar Scaliger, left 1,382 volumes at the time of his death in 1609."
I suspect that Shakespeare skimmed many a new volume at the bookstalls outside St. Paul's, but closely rad fewer books than is often imagined by bookish scholars, who (like everyone who writes about Shakespeare) have a subliminal desire to make him more like themselves than he really was."

Books would also have been a encumbrance for a man who never took permanent lodgings in London and who traveled to Stratford at least once a year. Among the books that Shakespeare may have owned are Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses and North's Plutarch, some of Ovid's other works in the original Latin, Horace's Odes, the plays of Plautus and Seneca, Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, perhaps in the Thomas Speght edition of Chaucer in 1598 or 1602, which would have been where he read "The Knight's Tale," the source for The Two Noble Kinsmen, on which he and Fletcher collaborated. He may also have had a copy of Thomas Shelton's 1612 translation of Don Quixote, where he would have found the story of Cardenio that was the basis of the lost play on which he is said to have collaborated with Fletcher.

He may have known Gower's Confessio Amantis, the main source of Pericles, in which Gower himself appears as Chorus, but since the play was begun by George Wilkins, Shakespeare may have borrowed the book from Wilkins. There are no other borrowings from Gower in Shakespeare's work. When he was working on the history plays, he must have had a copy of Holinshed's Chronicles close at hand, as well as Edward Halle's Union of the Two Noble Illustre Families of Lancaster and York. His biblical allusions suggest a familiarity with the Bible in the Geneva translation and "the officially sanctioned Bishop's Bible," as well as the Book of Common Prayer.

Florio's translation of Montaigne influenced parts of The Tempest, and he probably consulted Florio's English-Italian dictionary and grammar, as well as a "teach-yourself-French handbook called Ortho-epia Gallica, by a Warwickshire contemporary named John Eliot," which would have taught him "enough French to put together the language lesson in Henry V." William Painter's Palace of Pleasure was a collection of stories by Greek, Roman, Italian and French authors, including Boccaccio, whose Decameron provided the story that is the basis of All's Well That Ends Well. The plots and details in Othello, Much Ado, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, and Measure for Measure come from a variety of Italian sources or French translations of them. Bate suggests that Italian would have been easier for Shakespeare to read than French because of his training in Latin.

Earlier plays were sources for King John, Henry V, King Lear and of course Hamlet. Robert Greene's prose romance Pandosto was a source for The Winter's Tale and Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde for As You Like It. It's unclear whether Shakespeare knew Spenser's The Faerie Queene, but he seems to have admired Samuel Daniel, particularly the sonnet sequence Delia, and probably read Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella. He knew Sidney's prose Arcadia, from which he borrowed for the Gloucester plot in King Lear.

Thanks to his undoubted friendship with Richard Field and his very probable acquaintance with John Florio, Shakespeare had easy access to these books. This body of literature offers a deep insight into the mental world in which he lived. If one bears in mind the method of close reading in which he was trained at school, not to mention his prodigious memory for both the plays that he saw or acted in and the other books he devoured and disposed of more casually, then there need be no anxiety about the idea of a middle-class provincial grammar-school boy having the intellectual resources to write the plays. 

The parish records of Stratford-upon-Avon for 1570 through 1630 reveal that three-fourths of the men who married for the first time did so between the ages of twenty and thirty. "The mean age was twenty-six. The most frequently occurring was twenty-four. These figures are consistent with national averages." Only three men were in their teens when they married, but there was only one of these "in the whole sxty-year period whose bride was pregnant on the day of their marriage: the glover's son, eighteen-year-old William Shakespeare." And people have been gossiping about that fact for the better part of the last four hundred twenty-eight years.

We know that "on November 27, 1582, a license was issued for the marriage of William Shaxpere and Anna Whateley of Temple Grafton." It was a special license, issued when the banns were not going to be read for three Sundays before the wedding, and it required "a bond of sureties, guaranteeing that the prospective partners were entitled to marry. The Worcester registry has such a bond, dated November 28, 1582, referring to William Shagspere and Anne Hathwey of Stratford.... The wedding may be assumed to have taken place in early December 1582.... Susanna Shakespeare was baptized on May 26, 1584, so even if she was born somewhat prematurely there can be no doubt that Anne was pregnant on her wedding day."

Which Anne was it? Whateley, for whom the license was issued, or Hathwey, the name on the bond? (The Shaxpere/Shagspere problem is a negligible one: "Elizabethans were slapdash about names.") And was she named Anne? "Miss Hathaway, whom we always call Anne, is actually referred to in her father's will as Agnes, which would have been pronounced "Annes." Unless you want to make a big deal about it, and some do, it's best to assume that the clerk who meant to write down "Hathwey" got confused in the process, "perhaps because that same day a William Whateley had been involved in a case before the church court." The reference to Temple Grafton, a village much further away from Stratford than Shottery, where the Hathaways lived, is harder to explain. One theory holds that Anne had "been born a Hathwey in Stratford and married a Whateley in Temple Grafton" and that she was a widow. But Anne Hathaway had been recorded as unmarried in her father's will in the autumn of 1581, so that's cutting the whole marriage-widowhood-remarriage thing pretty close. "The probability is that Anne was indeed a 'maiden' and that she was in some form of service, perhaps with a distant relative, in Temple Grafton.

Her pregnancy would not have been much of a scandal: "it was generally agreed that a union was legally binding once a solemn spousal promise had been made, so the bedding often preceded the wedding." The age difference was more unusual: William was eighteen; Anne was "in her twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh year." Some like to read Venus and Adonis, "in which an innocent boy is seduced by a sexually  voracious older woman (or rather goddess)" as autobiography.

I have an instinctive sense that the wooer whom Shakespeare most resembles is Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice: clever but cold, an adventurer and a wordsmith who always looks after himself, a man on the lookout for a wealthy woman to help him out of a financial crisis and who has the good fortune to find one who is beautiful, ultraintelligent, and attracted to him. But there is no more evidence for this fancy than for the idea that William was somehow like Adonis (or Petruchio or Orlando or any of his other characters) or that Anne was like Venus or Kate "the shrew" or Adriana, the put-upon wife of The Comedy of Errors. 

Shakespeare's marriage may be the result of adolescent infatuation or an arranged marriage between two families who were close to each other. Anne was an heiress and Shakespeare's father was in debt. But Bate finds only "two certainties" in what we know about the marriage: One is that Shakespeare "was a sexually active young man" who found himself the father of three children -- Susanna and the twins Hamnet and Judith -- before he turned twenty-one. The other is that "the first formal record of his life subsequent to his baptism emerges from the diocesan consistory court."

We don't know what happened next, though an old story holds that he became "a schoolmaster in the country," which he couldn't have done in a grammar school of any great repute without a degree from university, although "he could have gained a post in a lesser school or as an 'usher,' a master's assistant." He could have supported his family that way, but sometime in the late 1580s he went to London to seek his fortune. Which he succeeded in doing: "By the summer of 1597 he was in the position to buy his wife New Place, the second-largest house in town -- albeit a property that was in a neglected state of repair, allowing him to obtain it at a knock-down price."

But it's the way he went about making his fortune that's surprising: Nobody got rich as an actor, and even when he realized that and started writing plays as well as acting in them, that was "an even more unlikely source of income than playing.... There were no wealthy writers." Bate sketches out the lives of twelve of the "most highly regarded dramatists among his contemporaries" to prove his point:

• John Lyly, born 1556, Oxford educated, married once, died "in very modest circumstances," age 52. 
• George Peele, born 1556, Oxford educated, married once, died "reputedly of syphilis" and in "financial difficulties," age 40.
• Robert Greene, born 1558, Cambridge educated, married once, died "in extreme poverty," age 34. 
• Thomas Kyd, born 1558, grammar school educated, never married, died "in poverty," age 35. 
• George Chapman, born 1559 or 1560, education unknown, never married, died without achieving financial success, age 74.
• Anthony Munday, born 1560, privately educated, married twice, died, with "an estate valued at the not-insignificant sum of £135," age 73. 
• Michael Drayton, born 1563, education unknown, never married, died, "with an estate valued at just under £25," age 68. 
• Christopher Marlowe, born 1564, Cambridge educated, never married, died, "stabbed to death by a twelvepenny dagger inserted just above the eye," age 29. 
• William Shakespeare, born 1564, grammar school educated, married once, died, "leaving a considerable property portfolio and several hundred pounds in cash," age 52. 
• Thomas Nashe, born 1567, Cambridge educated, never married, died, in "almost certain poverty," age 33. 
• Thomas Dekker, born about 1572, probably grammar school educated, married twice, died, "in debt, leaving his second wife in straitened circumstances," age about 60. 
• Ben Jonson, born 1572, Westminster School educated, married once, died, "impoverished but not in debt," age 65. 
• Thomas Heywood, born 1573, Cambridge educated, married once, died, "in respectable circumstances," age 68.

Shakespeare's "predecessors can be divided into those who married for money and those who were bachelors, either because they preferred to keep the company of men or because they could not afford to marry. No other major writer of the age married before reaching his legal majority, as he did." Like Shakespeare, Chapman, Drayton, and Munday tried to make a living by writing, but none of them invested in an acting company as he did. Munday, Chapman, Drayton, and Jonson achieved what financial stability they managed from patronage, and not from publication or theater performance. "It is striking that the men who did best out of their writing were the ones who began as actors: Munday, Shakespeare, Jonson, Heywood." The career that most resembles Shakespeare's is Heywood's: He began as an actor, made his reputation with a poem, Oenone and Paris, that he modeled on Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and also became a shareholder and playwright for a theater company, the Queen's Men.

Shakespeare made his fortune not by "literary innovation but by a business decision," buying into the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1594 and sharing in the profits. "The best estimate is that, once fully established, Shakespeare may have made between £150 and £200 per year from his shareholding. Modern comparisons are difficult to sustain, but in early-twenty-first-century terms, that is roughly the equivalent of £30,000-£40,000 or $60,000-$80,000 per year.... A few people in Elizabethan and Jacobean England were very much richer than Shakespeare, but the vast majority were very much poorer -- indeed, a high proportion of the residents of Stratford-upon-Avon were in poor relief." Moreover, Shakespeare sustained his wealth with investments in property in Stratford.

Becoming an investor of this kind, making enough money to keep the family going, and sustaining a marriage for well over thirty years: these are not the achievements of the romantic lover, but they are manifestations of love.

9. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 221-249

Chapter Ten: Notoriety. Chapter Eleven: "He Is Like Dr Faustus"

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Marlowe's play turned Tamburlaine into a popular-culture hero, "an urban legend of plebeian self-assertion," but it also "had a galvanizing influence on the career of his twenty-three-year-old creator." It also led other university graduates, such as Robert Greene, George Peele and Thomas Lodge, to venture into the theater with plays that imitated Tamburlaine. But only Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy came close to matching Marlowe's poetic and dramatic skill, and the success of their plays revolutionized English dramatic verse: "Before Marlowe and Kyd, tragic playwrights used rhymed lines; henceforth the dominant medium would be blank verse." Moreover, "In The Spanish Tragedy and Tamburlaine, subjects punish their rulers. Before Marlowe and Kyd, tragic violence runs from the top down or circulates among equals; henceforth, it issues from the bottom up as well."

Tamburlaine benefited from accidental good timing as well:

The zenith of Tamburlaine's war upon the world ... comes with the destruction of Babylon. In biblical typology, this event prefigured the coming of Antichrist and the end of the world. For the spectators of 1587, confronting the imminent arrival of the Spanish Armada and the armies of the Pope, the fall of Babylon warned the English that they too lay in the path of divine vengeance.

There were critics, of course. Thomas Nashe belittled Marlowe and Kyd for their use of "the swelling bombast of bragging blank verse." And Ben Jonson would later refer to "the Tamerlanes, and Tamer-Chams of the late Age, which had nothing in them but the scenical strutting, and furious vociferation, to warrant them to the ignorant gapers," although Jonson's put-down is perhaps aimed more at the imitations than at the original. Then, as now, there was a sense that popular acclaim vitiated a work's pretense to be Art. And then there was the problem of upstart writers with no university education, such as Kyd and, later, Shakespeare.

The art of making "pure iambic verse," formerly the preserve of educated scholars, had become available to any customer who could afford standing room in the yard or the price of a drink. That is why a social conservative like Nashe found Marlowe's blank verse so disturbing: anyone could make it.

The images in Tamburlaine that most caught the imagination of the time were the caging of the emperor Bajazeth; the white, red and black tents; and the harnessed kings with the bits in their mouths drawing Tamburlaine's chariot. They captured not only the popular imagination but also the religious: The Puritan John Field preached a sermon comparing the black tents to the wrath of God. "John Field, the prominent anti-theatrical writer, apparently refers to a live performance of Tamburlaine."

Next up seems to have been Dr. Faustus, although exact dating of the play is difficult. There was a vogue of plays about magicians in late Elizabethan times, but no one knows whether Marlowe set the fashion or followed it. His main source was an English translation of the German Historia von D. Johann Faustus. The German book appeared in 1587, and the translation may have appeared shortly after, although the only surviving text dates from 1592. The German book was such a success on the continent that translations into Danish, Dutch, French and Czech came out immediately, so it's not likely that the English version should have been five years behind.

The Faust legend seems to begin with Simon Magus, a first century C.E. Samaritan who is referred to in Acts 8:9-24, and in the Apocrypha. He was said to have "kept the reincarnated Helen of Troy as his consort" and to have had a disciple named Faustus whom he turned into his double. The real-life George (or Johann) Faust died about 1540. Philipp Melanchthon, the follower of Luther, is responsible for publicizing the legend that Faust had sold his soul to the devil, part of the hard line that the Lutherans took on witchcraft.

Marlowe's version doesn't take Faust nearly as seriously as the Lutherans did. His Faustus is given to mistakes such as quoting Cicero when he's supposedly reading Aristotle, quoting Aristotle when he thinks he's talking about Galen, and so on. "The erudite author, Christopher Marlowe, did know the right citations and scripted the wrong ones into Faustus's part." He also mangles quotations from Scripture: "Faustus chops each of the Scriptural verses in half, in both cases citing the divine condemnation while omitting the promise of redemption that follows. After proclaiming 'The reward of sin is death,' St Paul writes, 'but the gift of God is eternal life' (Romans 6:23)." In doing so he follows the example of Calvin, who also "isolates the first half of Romans 6:23 and insists that 'all sin is mortal.'" In Calvinist doctrine, only the elect will receive the forgiveness of God and receive eternal life.

Critics rightly point out that Faustus is hideously mistaken about the Bible; but the Church he is rejecting has taught him to make precisely these mistakes. Marlowe, who had already been taxed with atheism, unveils in Dr Faustus the ecclesiastical basis of his own unbelief.... Divine justice was supposed to terrorize the reprobate into good behaviour; yet the godless had ample reason to disbelieve in a God who had already condemned them to sin and damnation regardless of their earthly conduct.

And despite Faustus's ambitions to "wield godlike powers," he becomes nothing more than "a magician for hire and confidence man," reduced near the end of the play to practical jokes on a horse trader. In this respect, Faustus is something of a self-portrait of Marlowe: "Herein lay the irony of giving poor boys like John Faustus and Christopher Marlowe a classical education. Books instilled a desire for what they could never have: material wealth, social legitimacy and cultural authority.... Dr Faustus signals Marlowe's awareness of his own position in the world after Cambridge."

7. The World of Christopher Marlowe, pp. 159-189

Chapter Eight: Proceeding in the Arts

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In 1587, turning twenty-three, Marlowe "suddenly vaulted into the tripartite roles of wayward scholar, secret agent and innovative poet-playwright." He completed his work for the M.A., which required attending "lectures in philosophy, astronomy, optics and the Greek language," as well as participating in eleven public disputations. And he somehow did this while taking multiple leaves of absence.

One thing the M.A. course curriculum did was teach students "to conceive of the cosmos as a poetic and theatrical spectacle." The field called "optics" included math, geometry and cosmography, which was a mixture of geography and history; its focus on the rise of the Roman empire inspired Marlowe's Tamburlaine, which is about world conquest. When Tamburlaine besieges Damascus, he speaks of it terms of map-making: His "poetic understanding of mapmaking glosses over the horror of what he is about to do. Were Zenocrate sees the destruction of an existing city, Tamburlaine appeals to the root sense of geo-graphy as 'world-writing.'"

Elizabethan England was on the verge of its own campaign of world conquest: "The impending war with Spain intensified the need for cartographers, navigators and military engineers." These were generally recruited not from the aristocracy, whose "sense of class privilege made them wary of science, which was hard to do, morally dubious and smacked of artisan labour," but from the ranks of the educated lower classes. "The mental labour of actually doing calculations in physics and astronomy could be left to the scholars. For them, the MA course opened up new opportunities for advancement." Marlowe's friends Thomas Hariot and Walter Warner were both employed by Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, as mathematician and physician respectively. Thomas Watson also was acquainted with Northumberland, and Marlowe claimed that he was "very well-known" to this "scion of a noble Catholic family with a long record of hostility to the queen," which made him "an excellent target for a would-be spy." Although study of the sciences was still bound up with religion, "Instead of seeking God in the heavens, Marlowe's generation charted the earthly course of imperial conquest."

Study of the classic poets also tended to lead away from religion toward science. In his pastorals Virgil invoked "Silenus, the Orphic bard who 'sang how, through the vast void, the seeds of earth, and air, and sea, and liquid fire withal were gathered together; how from these elements all nascent things, yes all, and even the young globe of the world grew together.'" Virgil also paid homage to Lucretius for study of the laws of nature, and Lucretius honored Epicurus, whose study of nature overcame superstitious beliefs. "Epicurus liberated humanity from the fear of the gods and the spectre of divine punishment after death.... Epicurus and Lucretius were primary sources for what the Romans referred to as 'impiety' and the Renaissance called 'atheism.'"

The celebration of the Orphic bards "reinvigorated the classical myth of the poet-seer." Horace asserted that "Orpheus, the first poet, had conveyed divine wisdom from the gods and elevated the human race from savagery to civility." Marlowe portrays Tamburlaine as a kind of poet-seer who, at the end of the second part of the play "becomes the Epicurean poet-hero who ascends the heavens in order to conquer his fear of death."

When Tamburlaine overthrows the king of Persia, he says, "What better precedent than mighty Jove?" Jupiter had devoured his father, Saturn, who had in turn killed his father, Uranus. But Tamburlaine identifies more with the Titans than the Olympians. Marlowe had begun translating Lucan's Civil War, in which the Titans "personify the destructive and creative forces that bring the degenerate Roman republic to ruin." The Titans were "imprisoned beneath Tartarus -- the word meant both 'hell' and 'central Asia' -- but still had the capacity to break loose in winds, earthquakes and storms." Tamburlaine's enemies refer to him as "Tartarian thief" and his men as "Tartarian rout" and "base born Tartars." And Tamburlaine "likens his sword to a force of nature now unleashed," and at the end imagines Jove as "pale and wan" when beholding him. "Tamburlaine has reduced the Olympian gods to a state of abject fear."

The study of astronomy overlapped that of astrology, which M.A. candidates studied even though it "had no formal place in the university curriculum." The brother astrologers Gabriel and Richard Harvey were on the university faculties. Unfortunately for Richard, he made a prediction of some major event when Jupiter and Saturn conjoined on April 28, 1583, and suffered ridicule when nothing significant took place. Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene and Marlowe were among those who mocked Harvey. But Marlowe retained his fascination with astrology, at least as a vehicle for metaphor, using it in Tamburlaine's speech about "A heaven of heavenly bodies in their spheres / That guides his steps and actions to the throne."

Astrology led to the study of magic. "John Case and Everard Digby, the pre-eminent natural philosophers at Oxford and Cambrdige, introduced students to the occult principles that controlled the natural world. Both men spent their careers synthesizing Aristotle's scientific works with texts about the universe of spirits." Continental books on magic by John Dee and Giordano Bruno sparked an interest in conjuring, which "was not a freak diversion at Oxford and Cambridge" but "a foreseeable outcome of the MA course.... This turn from study to sorcery supplies the rudimentary plot of Dr Faustus."

The last year of Marlowe's M.A. course, 1587, was the one in which the university authorities investigated the rumor that he had gone to the seminary at Rheims and the Privy Council was moved to defend him. The letter vouching for him was signed by Lord Treasurer Burghley, Archbishop Whitgift, Lord Chancellor Hatton, Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon and Sir James Crofts. There is some ambiguity in the letter. For one thing, after the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, the Duke of Guise withdrew his patronage of the Rheims seminary, which ceased to be a center of espionage. Antwerp had been conquered by the Duke of Parma in 1585, and Brussels became a staging area for plans to move into northern Holland and from there invade England. Burghley, Whitgift, Hatton and Crofts were involved  in negotiations with Parma to prevent that from happening. So it would have made more sense to send Marlowe to Brussels. And it was there that he might have become acquainted with the Faust legend: The German History of John Faust was published in 1587 and was "an overnight sensation in northern Europe."

Marlowe's Faustus, like his real-life counterpart, is German, [but] he unaccountably places himself in Holland during the opening scene of the play.... Marlowe's Dr Faustus vows to 'chase the Prince of Parma from our land.' Whenever he wrote these lines, Marlowe was thinking about -- and like -- a recent graduate who found himself in the Low Countries soon after Parma's conquest of Antwerp.

Marlowe was not unique among Elizabethan poets in doing this sort of spywork: "Samuel Daniel, Thomas Watson, ... and Ben Jonson all carried messages for the government." But of these only Marlowe had been accused of going over to the Catholic side. Burghley and Walsingham often recruited people who had been part of the Catholic intelligence network. In his accusations against Marlowe, Baines claimed that Marlowe had spoken approvingly about Catholicism. "Bear in mind, finally, that Marlowe always appears in the government documents as an object of surveillance."

Marlowe's role-playing as a spy dovetails neatly with his career in the theater: "he was the first university graduate to forge a lasting professional bond with the adult players" in "the newly erected London theatres." Jobs in the field for which he was nominally prepared, the church, were growing scarce. "The going rate for a minor parish priest was ten pounds a year. Against this backdrop of exclusionary job placements and low-paying work, Marlowe's decision to become a professional writer looks like a shrewd career move." He "belonged to the group of poets who were born around the time of Elizabeth's accession, attended grammar school and university during the early decades of her reign and flourished during the 1580s and early 1590s." Sir Philip Sidney stood out from this group as an aristocrat. Others in this company include Edmund Spenser, Abraham Fraunce, George Peele, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Watson and John Lyly. All of them "kept a safe distance from the disreputable adult acting companies."

Marlowe seems like a rebel in this respect, and also because he set himself up in opposition to Spenser, "the English Virgil," by taking Ovid as his model. And his "fascination with ancient models of anti-authoritarian writing soon led him to the kindred of Lucan," whose Civil War he began to translate into English, completing the first book in 1592-93. Lucan is a major influence on Tamburlaine, which Marlowe wrote in 1587. Marlowe's Tamburlaine, like Lucan's Caesar, has the gift of oratory that persuades others to follow him.

Lucan's panoramic view of soldiers flocking to join Caesar's army foreshadows the hordes that rise in response to Tamburlaine's call: "All Asia is in arms with Tamburlaine ... All Afric is in arms with Tamburlaine." .... Marlowe was about to cross his professional Rubicon.

5. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 98-126

Chapter Six: The Teacher of Desire

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Once he received his B.A., Marlowe had freedom to leave Corpus Christi for extended periods, and took advantage of it for weeks and sometimes months throughout his M.A. studies. The last time he was recorded as present at the college was in March 1587. But the only recorded appearance away from the college comes in Canterbury in August 1585, when he served as witness to the last will and testament of the mother of a fellow student. He signed his name as "Cristofer Marley." "It is his only extant autograph signature."

During this time, he may have devoted himself to translating Ovid's Amores, the "most obscure and lascivious" of Ovid's love poems.

Marlowe's translation of the Amores bears many traces of apprentice work. His line-for-line rendering frequently departs from the plain sense of the original, occasionally lapses into obscurity and lacks the sure metrical touch of his other verse, especially Hero and Leander, his later Ovidian poem. Although the botched translations in Marlowe's All Ovid's Elegies occasionally stem from errors in his Latin texts, many are his own doing. For this reason, scholars surmise that Marlowe put the Amores into English while a student at Cambridge. 

Marlowe's translation is "more direct and coarse" than the original, and he might have been prosecuted if he had published it under his own name. "The very act of translation forged a bond between Ovid and Marlowe, who revived the Roman poet's radical commitment to sexual licence and freedom of speech." When Marlowe's translations of the Elegies were published six years after his death, Archbishop Whitgift ordered them copies of them to be rounded up and burnt in St. Paul's Churchyard. Elements of the translation can be detected in his later work, including Hero and Leander, Dr. Faustus and Edward II. He also revived the ancient rivalry between Ovid and Virgil in Elizabethan England:

Edmund Spenser had staked his own claim to be the "Virgil of England" by publishing his inaugural book of pastoral eclogues, The Shepherd's Calendar (1579) and undertaking The Faerie Queene, a national epic of Virgilian proportions. Marlowe's translation of the Amores thus cast him in the Ovidian role of Virgil's ancient rival.

Marlowe's lyric, "Come live with me and be my love," is also an early work. He parodies it in his plays, including three times in Dido, Queen of Carthage, which dates from the mid-1580s. It was inspired by the song sung by the Cyclops to Galatea in Ovid's Metamorphoses. It was untitled until it was reprinted in the anthology The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, where it was called "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love." But the poem itself doesn't specify the genders of the speaker or the person spoken to -- the "kirtle" referred to in the poem could be either a man's tunic or a woman's dress or skirt.

In Marlowe's sources monologue turns into dialogue and the Passionate Shepherd becomes the protagonist in an Ovidian tragedy. After Galatea says no, the Cyclops crushes her lover Acis to death with a rock. ... When [Marlowe] recasts "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" in dramatic form, he does so in a context of rape, possession, prostitution and abandonment. 

The university men who turned to drama did so first for the children's companies made up of choirboys from the Chapel Royal, St. George's Chapel Windsor and St. Paul's, which performed at court throughout the sixteenth century. In 1576 the Chapel Children began performing for paying spectators at the Blackfriars Theatre under the supervision of William Hunnis, the Master of the Chapel Children, in a partnership with the Earl of Oxford and John Lyly. Like Marlowe, Lyly left Cambridge with no desire to have a career in the Church. So he wrote a prose narrative, Euphues: Or, The Anatomy of Wit, which became a bestseller in 1579 and was followed by an equally successful sequel, Euphues and His England in 1580.

Oxford, Lyly's patron, was trying to make a comeback at court after causing a scandal: He had secretly converted to Catholicism while in Italy, and when he returned to England he made friends with some Catholic noblemen whom he betrayed to the queen. In retaliation, the victims charged Oxford with "pederasty, atheism and repeated attempts to murder his enemies. Many of these accusations are quite believable." Some of the charges also echo the ones that Baines would later make against Marlowe, and "offer a glimpse of the libertine sentiments that circulated within Oxford's circle. Even if Marlowe did not belong to that circle, he knew people who did."

The evidence suggests that Dido, Queen of Carthage was written for the Chapel Children around 1584-85. It was not published until 1594, when it was attributed to both Marlowe and Thomas Nashe. But Nashe may simply have been the one who prepared the text for print; it "seems to be mostly Marlowe's work."

John Lyly gave Marlowe a model of what it meant to be a major playwright. Lyly had an immediate, transforming impact on the language of English comedy; his prose marked a qualitative leap forward from the rambling, invertebrate syntax of his predecessors. The finely crafted symmetries between the sound and the sense of Lyly's sentences enabled the children to project complicated ideas without losing their audience. Marlowe brought about a comparable revolution in the language of verse tragedy. Where Lyly invented an English approximation of Ciceronian prose, Marlowe captured the lofty sound of Virgil's epic verse in English poetry.

The difficulty was finding an equivalent for English verse to the quantitative metres of Latin, which are based on the length of the vowel sounds. For the long and short syllables of Latin, English poets were forced to substitute stressed and unstressed syllables. They "found it difficult to employ polysyllabic words without clogging the flow of the verse. Here is Surrey [in his translation of the Aeneid] on the run-up to Queen Dido's suicide: 'But trembling Dido eagerly now bent / Upon her stern determination.'" The alternative, sticking to monosyllables, produced monotonous lines like these from Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton's Gorboduc, the pioneering blank verse tragedy: "Yield not, O King, so much to weak despair, / Your sons yet live and long I trust they shall." In 1575, George Gascoigne published Certain Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Rhyme in English, in which he advocated "accentual iambic metres ('a foot of two syllables whereof the first is depressed or made short, and the second is elevate or made long') in a five-foot line.... Gascoigne had discovered iambic pentameter." But Gascoigne was skeptical about the ability of English verse to achieve "the richness and complexity that he recognized in classical poetry."

Marlowe's solution is found in the opening lines of Dido, Queen of Carthage:

Come, gentle Ganymede, and play with me:
w     s  w   s  ws     w   s    w   s
I love thee well, say Juno what she will.
w s    w    s     w   s w  s    w   s

Both verses contain the five pairs of alternating weak (w) and strong (s) syllables that constitute an iambic pentameter line.... In the first foot, "gen-" is at once the second syllable of the iamb "Come gen-" (ws) and the first syllable of the trochaic (sw) word "gentle." In the second "Gan-" likewise completes the iambic foot "-tle Gan-" (ws) and initiates the trochaic "Gany-" (sw).... Since polysyllabic words in English generally have trochaic (sw) rhythms ... trochaic words invariably disrupt iambic meters, however slightly. Marlowe turns this supposed liability into an asset. 

Marlowe also alters the tone of Virgil's story of Dido and Aeneas, which was supposedly "about manly Roman piety prevailing over effeminate Eastern passion." On the other hand, Ovid and Chaucer "saw Aeneas as a cad and a prig." "Marlowe considers this question from a queer point of view," juxtaposing the homosexual love of Jupiter for Ganymede and the heterosexual love of Aeneas for Dido. He parodies "Come live with me and be my love" by having Jupiter say "Come, gentle Ganymede, and play with me."

For Renaissance humanists, this was the definitive myth about homoerotic love, Jove's choice of Ganymede over Juno epitomized the Socratic preference for boys over women.... The distinction between eroticized male friendship and sodomy turned on cultural rather than exclusively sexual criteria. During the Renaissance, men were encouraged to love boys if both parties belonged to the same class and the relationship was not mercenary.... The stigma of sodomy attached to the base interloper who traded sex for reward and threatened the marital alliances that maintained class privilege.... The Earl of Oxford, the leading patron of boy actors in the mid-1580s, was himself a pederast, the only titled Elizabethan to be charged with sodomy.

As for Dido and her fate, Marlowe follows Ovid in minimizing her "moral culpability" and "enlarges the role of Cupid to show Dido as the victim of forces beyond her control."

Virgil's hero epitomizes the self-denying ethic taught in Renaissance Latin lessons, and Marlowe's play finds him wanting. Despite the misogyny that surrounds her, the radical will in this early play belongs to Dido. She alone speaks with the voice of desire that would become the trademark of Marlowe's tragic heroes.... When he writes Edward II a few years later, the conflict of king, queen and Ganymede descends from Mount Olympus into history, and the struggle between opposed sexualities comes to its appalling conclusion.